This invention relates to feeding apparatus and more particularly to apparatus for automatically feeding dough balls one at a time along one or more paths to the input of further apparatus for processing.
In accordance with the present practice, after dough balls for use in making tortillas, for example, are made up by an automatic dough ball forming machine, a tray of the dough balls is placed on a rack where they sit for a few minutes to proof, i.e., lighten the dough. A tray of dough balls is then carried from the proofing rack by an attendant and dumped onto a table, having loose flour on it, that is positioned in front of a pair of endless elevator chains each provided with cups that are used for carrying dough balls to the input of a flattening machine used for rolling the dough balls into round sheets. After first manually moving the dough balls about on the surface of the table so as to dust them with flour, the attendant then manually picks up the dough balls, one at a time in each hand, and places them onto the ascending cups of the pair of elevator chains for delivery to the input of the flattening machine. Since the need for manually feeding the dough balls in this manner to the flattening machine goes on for many hours each day, the attendant needs to be constantly working at a fast pace to make sure that he places a dough ball on each of the cups of the elevator chains.
This is especially a problem because the attendant is periodically interrupted by the need to obtain a new tray of dough balls from the proofing rack and dust the dough balls prior to again resuming the manual placing of the dough balls onto the continually advancing cups of the elevator chains.
It is thus seen that it would be highly desirable to provide an automatic dough ball feeding machine that could carry out the operations that the attendant has been manually performing, such as dusting the dough balls with flour and placing them one at a time on each of the advancing cups of the elevator chains. It should be noted that the step of proofing the dough balls would be eliminated because of the time that it would take for the dough balls to pass through the automatic dough ball feeding machine before entering the flattening machine.